ConvergeOne CASE STUDY ConvergeOne Eases UC Growing Pains With Nectar s Advanced UCMP Monitoring and Diagnostics Capabilities 1
ConvergeOne Leveraging Nectar UC Diagnostics for Real-Time, Cross-Platform Session Analysis Reduces Finger-Pointing and Provides Faster Issue Resolution in Constantly Changing Network Environments Founded in 1993, ConvergeOne is a leading global IT services provider of collaboration and technology solutions for large and medium enterprises. With decades of knowledge and expertise, they have created best-in-class solutions in customer experience, collaboration, contact center, cloud, data center computing, networking and security. The company has earned more than 1,700 industry certifications with over 200 technology partnerships including Avaya, Cisco, and Microsoft. Expertise across these UC applications enables ConvergeOne to partner with customers to achieve business outcomes regardless of the technology. ConvergeOne utilizes the Nectar Unified Communications Management Platform (UCMP) software suite in their - Managed Service offering to provide exceptional performance monitoring, incident management, and issue resolution for its customers. This technological advantage enables ConvergeOne to deliver a broad range of integration capabilities for voice, video, collaboration, and conferencing across complex, multi-vendor environments that include Microsoft Skype for Business, Cisco, Avaya, and more. As a long-time customer of ConvergeOne, a large Financial Services Group is one of the largest diversified financial services institutions in the United States, delivering a full range of retail and business lending products, including specialized services for corporations and government entities, along with wealth and asset management. Naturally, when they began experiencing growing pains as a result of the company s migration to a VoIP infrastructure, they looked to ConvergeOne to help them find a solution that would maximize their legacy investments and optimize their transitioning communications infrastructure. Understanding the Financial Institution s Challenge The Financial Institution conducts its business within a multifaceted UC environment that spans multiple platforms and vendor products, including Avaya Communications Manager for the company s enterprise and Contact Centers, Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) at all branch offices nationwide, and IPC Turret systems for the company s trading phones and voice recording capabilities. Within this dynamic, business-critical infrastructure, the company initially chose Nectar s UCMP solution to achieve At ConvergeOne, our goal is to resolve and fix problems within 15 minutes, stated Randy Drury, Director of Managed Services for ConvergeOne. By utilizing Nectar UCMP, we have visibility back to the customer environment, so we can fix problems faster and more easily. 2
real-time and historical monitoring across their entire multi-vendor network portfolio. Nectar UCMP was also the only vendor agnostic software solution capable of monitoring the financial institution s complex, crossplatform UC environment using a single pane of glass centralized view. Ensuring a Truly Seamless, Quality User Experience As the business grew and its network needs evolved, the company s IT staff was soon tasked with deploying a massive Cisco Call Manager upgrade across the company s 2,800+ branches and roughly 22,000 phones. From the start, they knew that identifying and resolving call issues was going to be of critical importance. According to the company s Senior Platform Engineer, in terms of troubleshooting, we could only see one element of a call from end-to-end. We needed the ability to see all the elements of a call from beginning to end in order to resolve issues and avoid finger-pointing between IT network teams. Although the Financial Institution utilized multiple, disparate tools to manage their multi-vendor UC environment, none of these could effectively trace a call from end-to-end. The level of effort involved in gathering detailed tracing information, as well as the inability to coordinate multiple resources across network teams easily and efficiently contributed to a cumbersome and timeconsuming resolution process. With OneVision, we can provide information on the root cause of problems from the client back to the carrier, and it all starts with the Nectar software in our monitoring services, noted Drury. The Financial Institution was impressed with the amount of data and monitoring that was provided. Nectar helped reduce the amount of downtime and limited the number of issues that otherwise would be escalated to more expensive resources. Almost immediately, the company realized that they needed a more specialized tool that could deliver realtime visibility and insight into complex call flows one that would allow for rapid identification of all legs of a call, and automatically capture session signaling packets for quick debugging. The company also wanted to ensure that whatever solution they chose would provide the level of scalability needed to adapt easily to their ever changing technical environment. Large Financial Institution s VoIP Migration Challenges Inability to trace calls end-to-end Multiple, disparate tools unable to see all elements of a call Inability to effectively correlate call data end-to-end Lack of cross-platform insight within multi-vendor environment Ongoing Finger-pointing Constantly changing network environment ConvergeOne Service and Support Center 3
After creating a Requirements Document that prioritized IT needs based on a weighted scale, the Institution s IT integration team quickly narrowed the list of potential products from 15 down to five. From there, Nectar s comprehensive, cross-platform insight and real-time diagnostics capabilities offered through the Nectar UC Diagnostics module rose to the top. What really stood out about Nectar was the uniqueness of their dependency tree functionality, their ability to correlate data across multiple platforms, and the fact that their suite of UCMP modules were completely vendor agnostic, said the Financial Institution s Senior Platform Engineer. Further, the integration of Microsoft Skype for Business was in the queue as a next step and they knew that Nectar had extensive proficiency with Microsoft Skype for Business and was uniquely capable of monitoring Skype for Business in real-time versus a post-call average. ConvergeOne is one of Nectar s largest partners with over 1.5 Million Ports under management utilizing Nectar s software suite. ConvergeOne s expertise in our solution greatly shaped the success of the Financial Institution s deployment. This coupled with the incredibly professional and competent IT team has made for a winning combination. The Institution s diverse infrastructure of Avaya, Cisco and Microsoft Skype for Business seamlessly matches the expertise and focus of ConvergeOne and Nectar. Improving Network Health by Reducing Time to Resolution Once deployed, the Financial Institution found that the Nectar UC Diagnostics module allowed them to quickly troubleshoot and isolate issues related to call quality. It identified a key trend that 1/3 of all calls were experiencing packet loss and they were able to tag packet loss back to specific routers because Nectar f ound the problem, noted the Senior Platform Engineer. It gave insight into issues not picked up by traditional network monitoring, and we were able to resolve and close the gap on that issue. From the user s business perspective, the UC Diagnostics module was the best fit and provided the level of granularity we needed, observed the Senior Platform Engineer. We quickly discovered a dramatic reduction in the finger-pointing game, as the product clearly showed us where failures and issues resided. Because Nectar UC Diagnostics utilizes cutting-edge, probe-based analyzer technology to fill in manufacturer blind spots, the Financial Institution is now able to create real-time, complete call diagnostics for every session, regardless of platform or client type. It allows their IT staff to collect comprehensive data from the actual conversation and instantly associate specific user-reported complaints to any events in any part of the network. Further, they are is able to configure alerts and notification thresholds through interactive dashboards. UC Diagnostics also provides the company with visualization of historical trends for executive-level tracking, management, and decision-making enabling the Financial Institution to improve the overall user experience Jamie Ryan Vice President-National Partners 4
The Nectar UC Diagnostics feature is amazing, confirmed the Financial Institution s Senior Platform Engineer. Its scoring capability and quick clicks to see the entire SIP ladder diagram of a call is worth its weight in gold for troubleshooting SIP calls. Why the Financial Institution Chose Nectar Real-Time Monitoring for instant visibility and analysis of active calls. Insight into complex call flows and rapid identification of all legs of a call to pinpoint and resolve problems quickly. A complete, correlated single pane of glass view that provides an easy-to-interpret presentation of all events and user experience metrics. Capability to capture inventory for centralized and maximized management resources. Scalability that allows UCMP products to grow as the customer s network changes and grows. A single tool for comprehensive monitoring and diagnostics across multiple UC platforms, including co-mingled Cisco, Avaya, and Microsoft Skype for Business environments. Proven integration of Skype for Business into existing Avaya and Cisco networks for real-time monitoring of calls versus post-call averages. The team I work with at Nectar is second to none, they are awesome. I am not bounced around when an issue arises. If I have a question, I always get a knowledgeable expert out the gate, declared the company s Senior Platform Engineer. They are extremely patient and always rise to the occasion with our demanding deliverables and timetables. Comprehensive Visibility across Any Multi-Vendor UC Environment Nectar s full suite of integrated UCMP capabilities helps optimize the overall health and performance of the Financial Institution s multi-vendor UC deployment utilizing a modular, scalable architecture that s built from the ground up to provide complete, centralized network visibility via a 360-degree view of all voice and data assets. By focusing on the company entire UC ecosystem, the company achieves enhanced performance via comprehensive reporting and analytics, infrastructure autodiscovery, root cause analysis, contextual monitoring, and at-a-glance troubleshooting. Further, UCMP brings clarity to the Institution s business processes and complex UC interdependencies providing the company with real-time visibility into each UC user s experience, and actionable performance information for faster issue resolution. Nectar UCMP enables their IT department to effectively manage multi-vendor network complexity, maximize existing technology investments, and achieve a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). 5
UCMP: Key Features Nectar UCMP delivers exceptional network, application, and endpoint health and performance management across monitoring, reporting, and diagnostics functions. Network Pre-Assessment enables you to visualize existing network gaps, and provides alerts on any issue that can affect UC performance. Multi-Vendor UC Application Health and Performance Monitoring provides complete visibility and immediate UC network awareness, significantly reducing the time it takes to isolate and resolve issues. Robust Reporting and Advanced Analytics provides superior business intelligence and enables you to track device performance and resource utilization trends. Diagnostics and Root Cause Analysis helps you quickly identify, isolate, and remediate UC performance issues while seamlessly integrating multi-vendor environments for a positive end-user experience. Next Steps: Deploying Microsoft Skype for Business Currently, the Financial Institution is deploying Microsoft Skype for Business across more than 50,000 users nationwide. Because of the unique way in which Nectar UC Diagnostics is integrated with Microsoft s Softwaredefined Networking (SDN) API, the IT department can easily and proactively monitor, manage and diagnose Microsoft Skype for Business in real-time. According to the company s Senior Platform Engineer, we are now in the process of upgrading our existing Nectar platform to our new data centers, and integrating it with our partially hosted Skype Solution and with ServiceNow to cut tickets on alerts. We cannot wait for our next chapter with Nectar as I m confident their solution will help us in our Skype deployment as dramatically as they have helped with our SIP, Cisco and Avaya platforms. About ConvergeOne Founded in 1993, ConvergeOne is a leading global IT service provider of collaboration and technology solutions for large and medium enterprise with decades of experience assisting customers transform their digital infrastructure and realize a return on investment. Over 5,700 enterprise and mid-market customers trust ConvergeOne with collaboration, enterprise networking, data center, cloud and security solutions to achieve business outcomes. Our investments in Cloud infrastructure and managed services provide transformational opportunities for customers to achieve financial and operational benefits with leading technologies. Uniquely positioned, ConvergeOne has partnerships with more than 100 global industry leaders, including Avaya, Cisco, IBM, Genesys and Microsoft to customize specific business outcomes. We deliver solutions with a full life cycle approach including strategy, design and implementation with professional, managed and support services. ConvergeOne holds more than 1,700 technical certifications across hundreds of engineers throughout North America including three Network Operations Centers. 6
About Nectar Services Corp. Nectar Services Corporation delivers market-leading software solutions that dramatically improve visibility into the performance of Unified Communications networks. Providing predictable and actionable information, users can manage, monitor, and proactively troubleshoot UC networks to improve service delivery across integrated voice, data, and video networks. Nectar software can be used in any multi-vendor UC environment that includes Microsoft Skype for Business, Cisco, Avaya, and more. For more information: www.nectarcorp.com Americas americas@nectarcorp.com Europe, Middle East, and Africa emea@nectarcorp.com Asia Pacific apac@nectarcorp.com Latin America latam@nectarcorp.com The Nectar logo is a trademark of Nectar Services Corp. Other company, product, or service names mentioned herein may be trademarks or service marks of their respective companies. This document may contain forward-looking statements regarding future events or product enhancements. All statements other than present and historical facts and conditions contained in this document are predictions and reflect our current beliefs and expectations with respect to future events. Any forward-looking statements are based on information available to Nectar as of the copyright date, and Nectar assumes no obligation regarding such statements. 7